If you could mention whether you are on the Free plan or on one of the paid ones, that would make it easier to figure out your issue. Optionally, the URL to your project(s), if they happen to be public.

Maybe we got out of a Silver/Bronze plan this weekend, I must check with the project owner, but reading the doc, I understand we can use variables with a Free plan, but we cannot use Environments, is this right?

I understand we can use variables with a Free plan, but we cannot use Environments, is this right?

I’m not an expert on that part of GitLab, but that’s what I understand from the documentation, yes. It would seem that you can in fact use Environments with the Free plan, but not in conjunction with variables.

I’d recommend to double-check the status of your subscription if you’ve got one. Regardless, you should always feel free to ask questions on the forum, but if you’ve got a paid plan, you have also got access to commercial support.

In addition, when I attempt to save a new variable under settings => CI/CD / variables, I get a ‘Validation failed’ error claiming a number of existing variables are ‘already taken’.

Also, I disagree that @j.ortega.traverso workaround resolves this issue. I really don’t want to have to re-create hundreds of variables across dozens of repos and rewrite the pipeline definitions for each.

This is also affecting us (gitlab.com, not self hosted). Everything was working fine until I got into the office on Monday. I can no longer figure out which variables are meant to go with which environment. Originally I had prefixed them with the relevant environment (e.g. TEST_DJANGO_ENV), but when Gitlab made environment variables scoped to the relevant environment I removed the prefixes and adjusted our build scripts.
Thankfully this has just broken our test and staging environments, but it would have been nice to have this communicated to us in some way rather than just having it break.

It’d be great to see when this was changed, only because the timing doesn’t seem to align with the blog post (this only seemed to be an issue from last Friday onwards ~7th Oct).
The existing variables need to removed as well not just prefixed all variables were still scoped to the relevant environment and were not being sent through to the runner. Maybe the interface could be modified to take into account these edge cases (if has scoped variables but not on the relevant plan show an alert message).

Oct 1st, 2018: end of Early Adopter plan (the actual rollout happened a few days after, reportedly on Oct 8th)

In summary, the plan start/end were announced publicly and opt-in subscribers were directly contacted. The planning for the roll-out was also planned in the open as an issue, keeping up with GitLab’s transparency values. To ease transition, the end of the plan was extended and an additional opt-in plan was offered.

I realize that despite these outreach efforts, not everyone could be notified and reminded of the upcoming plan changes. That’s where your feedback is important. If you have any suggestions on how to improve the process for the next campaign, we’d love to hear them.

djunkim:

Could you point us to some documentation as to what exactly changed?

As an immediate piece of input, what I hear is that the actual impact of ending the plan could have been communicated in more detail to avoid confusion. You can compare the feature availability when moving from to the Silver to Free plan here:

Just in case you’re interested, here’s a list of all Silver level features that are included in the Early Adopter Plan.

That should be the full set of features that were disabled when migrating from Early Adopter to Free.

simoncoulton:

The existing variables need to removed as well not just prefixed all variables were still scoped to the relevant environment and were not being sent through to the runner. Maybe the interface could be modified to take into account these edge cases (if has scoped variables but not on the relevant plan show an alert message).

Thank you all for the constructive feedback so far. It’s also great to see forum members helping each other with suggestions and solutions as issues come up.